In this part of the article marketing basics we will address what is article marketing, how it should be used and what should you focus on in your articles. Note that each of the explanations here will be brief and to the point, for more detailed explanations, or better yet, practical explanations, of article marketing and all of its aspects you can later read through the advance article marketing.
The second practical SEO principle states to aim for quality rather than quantity, that also applies to article marketing. Although we need a large number of backlinks the idea is as follows, you can get your articles and submit them to 100 article directories, or you can try hard and write an article full of high quality content that will be syndicated by others, so that way you write one article and get dozens or hundreds of backlinks without submitting that article to more than one article directory. Sounds good in theory, but it is much harder in practice. We got that out of the way, so let’s get to the point, but remember, with every part of SEO you need to implement practical SEO principles and you will do just fine, that goes for article marketing as well.
What is Article Marketing?
Article marketing is a way to drive traffic and get backlinks to your site, which is the first thing you need to understand. Article marketing boils down to submitting your article to article directories. While this may be true it is only a tiny bit of what article marketing really is. There is no point submitting one article to dozens of directories if that article isn’t going to be read, that backlink won’t mean anything if it’s not optimized and doesn’t have any activities.
So you need to write an article that is catchy and has good content. So the first part is Writing a High Quality Article. The article consists of three parts:
– Resource Box
We will discuss each of these in more detail when we come to Writing a High Quality Article, for now let’s just say that you need a catchy and strong title that has the keyword in it. The body must be useful, no need to write an article that doesn’t provide useful information, people are looking for info, so you give them info. That info, your body, needs to have the keyword appear a few times in it. Don’t stuff the article with keywords, and don’t do the 3% to 7% routine, there is no point; it will just make your article hard to read.
What you need to do is put the keyword once or twice in the first paragraph, once or twice in the rest of the body and once in the closing paragraph. That means 3 to 5 repetitions of the keyword in your article. That is for a 300 to 700 word article which is the optimum for article directories, never go below 300, and I don’t encourage people to go over 700 if they are not sure about the quality. So you have 4 to 6 keywords including the title, which means you will have about 1% to 2% keyword density, which is enough for search engines to understand what your content is about. If you don’t trust me take the number one article directory for example, Ezine articles. They don’t allow more than 2% keyword density in their articles to be published.
The resource box is another story, the only thing you need to concern yourself for now is to add one or two links back to your website with the keyword you used for the article as the anchor text and you need to make a call to action. No need writing a resource box that doesn’t tell people what to do or at least present your side, resource box is the promotional tool, if you don’t use it you might as well give up on article writing and article marketing in general.
The second step is submitting your articles. Now we begin to explain the technicalities behind article marketing. The fact is that you can submit your articles to hundreds of article directories, but you don’t have to. Concentrate on most visited article directories, you have a list of 30 do follow websites where you can submit your articles here on practical SEO. Use them; these are all high PR sites with good Alexa rank, which means good traffic. Like we already said, there is no point of submitting an article if it’s not going to be read.
The keywords you use need to be well researched in order to get your articles visible, i.e. in order for people to be able to find them. Some of these articles will take time to be indexed, so you can hurry that up. Two ways to speed the indexing on your site and to promote them at the same time:
– RSS feeds
– Social bookmarks
If the site you are submitting your article has an RSS feed, use it. It will get search engines to index your site faster. Social bookmarks, good for driving traffic to your website and also good for search engines, your article will get indexed faster and it will even get some link juice flowing from the backlinks that social bookmarking sites provide.
So there you have the basic article marketing for you.
All of that while sticking to practical SEO principles. Article marketing has a great use, in both linking and driving traffic to your site. By creating relevant content and linking from it back to your site you can achieve with 10 links what many can’t with thousands of links, so always go for the quality. I will repeat that until you print that into your brain, so prepare to hear a lot of that in the Basic Article Marketing Part 2.